God’s Secret Agents: Queen Elizabeth's Forbidden Priests and the Hatching of the Gunpowder Plot. Alice Hogge

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СКАЧАТЬ be executed in London under Elizabeth; more than that, he was rumoured to have joined the Society of Jesus while a prisoner.* In the summer of 1575 Henry Garnet left London for Rome to join the Jesuits himself.⁵

      Garnet’s return to England in July 1586 was followed with uncomfortable swiftness by his promotion to Superior of the English Jesuits just a couple of weeks later, after the arrest of the man under whom he had come to serve. The death of Campion still hung albatross-like around the neck of the Jesuit mission; moreover, it seemed those destined to pay the price for that death were not Campion’s killers, but the men struggling to follow in his footsteps. In the six years between Campion and Persons’ first landing and Garnet’s arrival the Jesuits had failed to establish a permanent bridgehead in England. Aborted attempt had followed aborted attempt. And now with the threat of the Spanish Armada drawing nearer, Garnet’s own efforts to revive the mission seemed destined to flounder in the wave of anti-Catholic feeling sweeping over the country.

      Garnet’s first action as Jesuit Superior had been to write to Rome for more men to be hurried over to help him. In the spring of Armada year he was informed that reinforcements—in the shape of John Gerard and Edward Oldcorne—would soon be on their way. So as the events of 1588 unfolded about him Garnet prepared for their coming, choosing the cottage in Finsbury as a base for the mission, for ‘since it was believed that no one was actually residing there, it was never molested by the officers whose duty it is to make the rounds of every house to enquire whether the inmates are in the habit of attending the [Protestant] church’. He was in London to witness the spate of executions that took place that autumn, as post-Armada relief gave way to bloodlust and revenge. In all, seventeen priests, nine Catholic laymen and one woman were executed over a three-month period. The one woman to be killed, Margaret Ward, was charged with supplying the priest William Watson with a rope to escape from the Bridewell prison—sympathetic onlookers claimed that as she climbed to her death they could see she was ‘crippled and half-paralysed’ by torture. Elizabeth, herself, was said to have been appalled by Ward’s death and ‘it was for that reason that recently she pardoned two other women who had borne themselves before the tribunal with singular courage’, wrote Garnet in October. Two months later Garnet was in the crowds to watch Elizabeth’s triumphal procession to St Paul’s Cathedral to give thanks for England’s victory. And throughout this time still he waited for news of Gerard and Oldcorne’s safe arrival.⁶

      There are few details of Gerard’s meeting with Garnet in Finsbury that winter—Gerard himself is significantly quiet on the subject—but the following March Garnet wrote to Claudio Aquaviva, Jesuit General since the death of Everard Mercurian in 1581. His letter is characteristically cryptic, but in it he mentions ‘that without consulting me at all [Gerard] did things which [he] had no authority to do and which manifestly [he] should never have done’. During his brief stay in Norfolk it seemed not only had Gerard freely dispensed spiritual guidance and religious pardons, but he had also passed information—probably details of the privileges granted by the Pope to the English Jesuits—to ‘certain priests who, during their time in Rome, were not considered well disposed to us’. With memories of priests-turned-informers like Charles Sledd and Gilbert Gifford still fresh in mind, such an action was risky at best. At worst it threatened to destroy the mission. And although Garnet concluded his letter ‘It is not a serious matter but it might have been’, it must have seemed to him now that his new recruit was uncommonly confident in his own abilities and apparently lacking in discipline. It was not an auspicious start.⁷

      Before Christmas the fourth and final Jesuit priest on the mission arrived back in Finsbury from a tour of the country.* Robert Southwell was twenty-seven years old, the son of an old East Anglian family. His grandfather had been one of the commissioners for the dissolution of the monasteries, his mother had been a childhood companion of the then Princess Elizabeth and his father was a prominent courtier. Among his more important relations were Lord Burghley, Sir Francis Bacon and the Attorney General, Sir Edward Coke. Southwell’s family serves as a particularly colourful reminder of just how few assumptions can be made about the religious complexion of England at this period.⁸

      Southwell left home for the English College at Douai in the summer of 1576, aged fourteen. In November that year he moved to the Jesuit College of Cleremont near Paris and in the spring of 1578 he applied to join the Society of Jesus. Political upheavals in the Spanish Netherlands and an initial rejection by the Society on the grounds of his youth meant it was not until October, and then only in Rome, that Southwell was admitted to the Jesuit noviceship, around the time of his seventeenth birthday. There, he quickly won praise for his skills as a writer and respect for his vivid intelligence. When, in 1586, Henry Garnet was chosen to leave for England to join the mission it was the poet Southwell who was picked to accompany him on the journey.⁹

      Since that time, like Persons and Campion before them, Garnet and Southwell had travelled England in secret, labouring to rebuild the network of Catholic families willing to maintain a priest; labouring, too, to enlarge that network in the face of increased government persecution.* They had become a formidable team. With the arrival of John Gerard and Edward Oldcorne that team had doubled. What remained unclear, though, was how many of their countrymen would still be prepared to welcome them in, now that Catholicism had been linked so strongly with un-Englishness in the public consciousness. For if to be Catholic was to be an unnatural Englishman, then to draw attention to that unnaturalness in the weeks and months following the Spanish Armada was tantamount to signing your own death warrant. This being the case the new and expanded Jesuit mission seemed destined to have only limited appeal.¹⁰

      And for the English Government and the Catholic Church both, religion had become a numbers game. To play for were the souls of all those who still stood wavering in the middle of the great religious divide. For the Government 1588 had proved a windfall year, drawing to the Church of England all those obedient to the pull of patriotic fervour, like the Earl of Shrewsbury (viewed by most as ‘half a catholic’), who now redoubled his efforts to rout out seminary priests on his estates.* The challenge for the Jesuits was to reverse this process.¹¹

      ‘Christmas was drawing near’, wrote Gerard, ‘and we had to scatter. The danger of capture was greater at festal times and, besides, the faithful needed our services. I was sent back, therefore, to the county where I had first stepped ashore.’ As December 1588 drew to a close and England wearily prepared to celebrate the Nativity, Gerard retraced his steps to Norfolk.¹²

      Norfolk seems to have turned its back on English affairs throughout much of history. While other shires engaged in the civil disturbances that marred the reigns of weaker monarchs, in the county-league rivalry of the Wars of the Roses, Norfolk scanned the horizon for the distant sails of potential invaders, for the safe return of its merchant ships and indulged in a style of law-lessness all its own. The county records bristle with stories of Norfolk nobles and squires holding their neighbours to ransom, of houses defended ‘in a manner of a forcelet’ and of bands of armed retainers roaming the district in search of someone to terrorize.¹³

      Hanseatic merchants brought the writings of Martin Luther to Norfolk early in the sixteenth century. Luther’s ideas were greeted with enthusiasm by the academics of nearby Cambridge; soon a band of them, including a number of Norfolk men, were meeting regularly in the town’s White Horse Tavern (behind King’s Parade), which quickly became known СКАЧАТЬ